Generally, both professional and do-it-yourself painters must spend substantial time cleaning their various tools and containers at the close of a painting session or when switching between paint colors. Such tools and containers may include brushes, rollers, pans, sponges, buckets, and more.
Buckets are particularly difficult to clean in a manner that leaves the bucket free of dried, clumped, and/or crusted paint at the start of the next painting session. Primarily, painting buckets are generally deep five-gallon containers with a great deal of surface area to be cleaned. These size and depth complications are exacerbated when excess paint, which has been wiped from brushes, rollers, and the like, dries into the upper ridges or edges of the bucket. As a result, a painter must either expend valuable time and effort cleaning the internal surfaces and the external ridges of the bucket to render the bucket reusable or dispose of the bucket altogether. For professional painters charging between $35.00 and $50.00 per hour, a half-hour spent cleaning equipment at the end of the day and/or between each color change amounts to a sizeable production loss.
Beyond the time required to clean painting buckets when a painter is stopping for the day, breaking for a period of time, or changing paint colors to continue a job, bucket cleaning requires a great deal of water and an appropriate dump site. Many commercial job sites are not equipped with running water due to staged construction and/or other practical job-site complications. Other job sites don't have appropriate drainage facilities that can accommodate gallons and gallons of paint-tainted water.
Because cleaning a painting bucket between each paint session disposes of the paint coating the bottom, sides, and ridges of the bucket, each cleaning sacrifices a nominal amount of paint. Over time, this amount of washed-away paint adds up to a significant amount of waste.
Disposable bucket liners may provide an alternative to cleaning a paint-coated bucket in preparation for reuse. Using a disposable liner, a painter may complete a job and simply dispose of the liner before replacing it with a new one and continuing on with a new paint color or restarting the project after a break or delay in work. That said, current disposable liners, plastic bags, and/or other disposable receptacles exhibit numerous deficiencies. Generally, liners that are sized and configured to fit the inside of a painting bucket have a height that stops short of the height of the bucket so as not to interfere with the bucket's lid. As a result, the liners don't overlap or fold over the bucket rim, which allows the liners to shift position when paint is poured inside and fails to protect the top rim and the outer ridges encircling the top of the bucket. In addition, existing liners are designed for one-time use and do not feature reusable closure mechanisms that allow for the removal, storage, and later reuse of the paint-filled liners. As a result, they don't allow a painter to quickly and easily store unused paint remaining in the liner during a work stoppage, either for a break, and evening, or while the painter switches between paint colors.
Due to these drawbacks, there is a need for an affordable, disposable mechanism for keeping a paint bucket clean over the course of multiple uses and for allowing paint and painting tools to be stored for easy reuse between painting sessions and color changes.